One estimate: Cost of Target data breach could hit $680 million

It is the other “who” question in the Target data breach story … . At Reuters, David Henry and Karen Freifeld say: “The theft of credit and debit card data from 40 million Target Corp customers could end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is unclear who will bear the expense, lawyers and industry sources said. … For big data breaches, the total cost typically amounts to about $17 per account, said Larry Ponemon, whose Ponemon Institute researches data breaches. For the Target breach, that would bring the total cost of the incident to somewhere around $680 million.”